Paul Ryan is right – you can be a conservative and a Christian

Ryan's Catholicism has been questioned by liberals who oppose his proposed budget

American liberals have a schizophrenic view of God. When it comes to lifestyle issues, they think church and state should be separate. But when it comes to welfare, federal largesse morphs into Christian duty. In the worldview of the Left, were the Second Coming to occur tomorrow, Jesus would sport an Obama 2012 badge on his tunic. And he certainly wouldn’t be the first person who came back from the dead to vote Democrat.

On Thursday, Republican Congressman Paul Ryan delivered a speech at the Catholic Georgetown University in Washington DC on the subject of God and the US budget. Ryan is a small government conservative, so he was greeted by the inevitable posse of p-oed liberals. They carried a big banner that read, “Were you there when they crucified the poor?” The banner turned out to be bigger than the protest, but its sentiment was backed up by a letter signed by 90 faculty members and priests protesting Ryan’s economics. They wrote, “We would be remiss in our duty to you and our students if we did not challenge your continuing misuse of Catholic teaching to defend a budget plan that decimates food programs for struggling families, radically weakens protections for the elderly and sick, and gives more tax breaks to the wealthiest few.” The letter concluded, “In short, your budget appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, [the libertarian] Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

The claims of the letter writers deserve to be taken seriously because they deal with the duty that we all have to care for vulnerable. Put simplistically, Christ commands his followers to a) value the spirit above the material and b) give alms to the poor. It is not unreasonable to conclude that the Christian message of self-sacrificing love finds its programmatic expression in social democratic welfarism. Why not use the technology and power of the modern state to create a more humane world? And if we have the capability to do it, how can anyone who opposes the redistribution of wealth seriously call themselves a Christian?

In his speech, Ryan explained how. First, charity is impossible without wealth. Unless America comes up with an economic plan that encourages growth, more people will be forced into unemployment, the tax intake will shrink, and both private giving and government handouts will cease. Second, big government programmes have consistently failed to work. The Federal Government has been fighting a “War on Poverty” since the 1960s. The result is that today one in six Americans lives in poverty – the highest rate for a generation. Third, bankruptcy will damage those parts of the welfare state that everyone wants to protect. Unless Social Security is reformed, it will run out. That hurts the folks who really need it, an act of negligence that passes the high cost of our mistakes onto a future generation, which is an immoral thing to do. In sum, Christian socialism in action can have troublingly unchristian consequences.

Ryan’s governmental philosophy is classically Christian in that it sees man as a flawed being that cannot be perfected within the mortal realm. Any attempt to “improve” him without his free engagement in the process is a hubristic act that will inevitably end in tyranny and failure. In America, Catholics historically resisted big government progressivism precisely because they didn’t want to lose control of their own destiny as a community. Hence, Catholics once went to their own parochial schools and the Church provided its own welfare structure in the forms of soup kitchens for the hungry and seminaries for the unemployable. As an institution, the Catholic Church only really embraced aggressive welfarism in the 1960s, because the parochial school system was on the verge of bankruptcy and needed some sweet tax dollars. It’s the combination of a growing reliance upon public funding and a post-Sixties theological radicalism that birthed Georgetown’s contemporary liberal bias. But it’s not fair to accuse Ryan of not being a Catholic just because he departs from that consensus. On the contrary, his vision of charity as local and voluntary is closer to the pre-1960s Catholic tradition. One still finds vestiges of it in the services that the Church offers to Mexican immigrants.

Paul’s voluntary approach is also at the heart of the Christian faith, which constantly challenges the individual to test their conscience. A conversion is worthless if it is forced because it may be false. As with faith, so with works. An act of charity that occurs because of state compulsion might be a material necessity but it is typically regarded as an empty gesture, even a harmful one, because it has not run through the check of personal conscience. Such is the Christian obsession with doing things for the right reason that it can be argued that a good deed done for the wrong reason might be, on balance, a bad thing. We see the manifestation of the importance of free will in decayed socialist economies. When people are overtaxed, they come to resent the poor, to rely on bureaucracies rather than civil society, to lower their productivity and to morally decline. Only when charity is done freely and for the right reasons will it have the effect that Christians are really aiming for: saving the souls of two people at once, the willing donor and the grateful recipient.

It’s the attention to the free will of the individual that makes America and Christianity so well suited to one another. The paradox has been noted many times that America has a separation of church and state and yet faith plays a big part in society and politics, while in the UK we have an established church but very little civil engagement by Christians. As Pope Benedict argued when he visited the US in 2008, this actually isn’t a paradox at all. Christianity has flourished in the United States partly because it has escaped the dead hand of state power but also because its doctrine of free will accords well with the American spirit of individualism. For that reason, one might argue that Paul Ryan’s fiscalism is not only Catholic but distinctly American Catholic. In contrast, the protestors who critiqued his speech hail from a liberal statist tradition that is far closer to the European reality than the American ideal.